Enough

Have you ever wondered how people centuries ago figured out what to do in bed—or worse, how they were taught to do it? In Put What Where?, journalist John Naish peeks under the covers of 2,000 years of sexual instruction, superstition, and sheer madness to show that human beings have spent as much time misunderstanding sex as they have enjoying it. The book isn’t just a funny history lesson; it’s a cultural safari through how religion, pseudoscience, power, and prurience shaped the way societies tried to control desire.

Naish argues that while sex is fundamental to human life, it has rarely been treated as such. Each era—ancient China, Rome, medieval Europe, Victorian England, or the modern West—produced its own version of the sex manual, a curious mix of morality and fantasy. These manuals reflected not knowledge but anxieties, taboos, and obsessions. For most of history, he shows, sex advice was less about love or pleasure and more about control—especially control of women’s bodies and male virtue.

Why We’ve Always Needed Sex Manuals

Naish begins with a simple question: why, when every other animal manages reproduction instinctively, do humans need instruction books? His answer is revealing. Because sex for humans isn’t only biological—it’s cultural, moral, and political. Whether it’s Confucian purity codes or Victorian prudery, societies have never stopped trying to manage the messy interplay between desire and respectability. He calls the writers of sex advice “sexperts,” a carnival of quacks, mystics, crusaders, scientists, doctors, and dreamers, each convinced they’ve found the secret formula for moral purity or erotic bliss.

These guides were rarely just practical manuals; they were guides to an ideal life. In one epoch, sex was sacred alchemy that could bestow immortality; in another, it was a sin leading to insanity or damnation. In modern times, Naish suggests, sex advice became a form of consumer entertainment—a way to sell reassurance to the insecure rather than insight to the curious.

From Ancient China to Modern Self-Help

The book begins with the earliest known sex texts—silk manuscripts buried in a 2nd-century BC Chinese tomb. These advocated mystical pleasure as a route to immortality. By exchanging energy between men and women—without ejaculation—a man could supposedly live forever. These early Taoist treatises mixed spiritual cosmology with anatomical error, warning that losing semen could shorten life. Naish links these beliefs to later Western notions that masturbation and frequent sex would sap vitality—showing how false biology has a long half-life.

The Greeks and Romans produced their own advice literature, but often cloaked in poetry. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was both a seduction manual and a scandal that got the author exiled. The medieval Church took the opposite tack: St. Theodore’s Penitential listed punishments for every imaginable sexual act. Where the ancients saw pleasure as divine, the clerics saw temptation as the devil’s work. The Renaissance brought printing—and with it, erotic entrepreneurship. Illustrated manuals like I Modi (The Ways) made sexual positions an art form, while Nicholas Venette’s Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald (1703) dressed superstition in medical Latin.

Moral Panics and Medical Fantasies

Naish traces how, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sex advice blended religion with pseudoscience. Masturbation became the era’s great moral terror, thanks to pamphlets like Onania, which claimed self-pleasure led to blindness, insanity, and death. Evangelical reformers such as John Harvey Kellogg (inventor of cornflakes) and Sylvanus Stall went further, prescribing circumcision and carbolic acid to suppress “abnormal excitement.” Victorians like Dr. William Acton solemnly pronounced that most women “are not troubled by sexual feeling,” while reformers like Marie Stopes countered with the radical idea that women might actually enjoy sex.

As sex became medicalized, “proper” behavior was reframed as hygiene. Tracts like Theodoor Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage (1928) or Eustace Chesser’s Love Without Fear tried to replace mysticism with clinical precision. But, Naish observes, they still moralized erotic pleasure—just with longer words and whiter coats. By the twentieth century, yearning was pathologized: frigid women, nymphomaniacs, and those with “exaggerated cravings” were labeled as sick rather than sinful.

The Age of Liberation and Saturation

Naish shows that by the mid-1900s, the pendulum swung again. Havelock Ellis’s psychological studies and Margaret Sanger’s crusades for contraception reframed desire as healthy. The 1960s sexual revolution turned old prohibitions into punchlines. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972) closed the loop begun with the ancient Chinese—transforming erotic instruction into a glossy, guilt-free celebration of mutual pleasure. But today’s deluge of manuals, videos, and tips, Naish argues, may have brought us full circle: we now risk replacing repression with performance anxiety. Where once celibacy was deviant, now “sexual inadequacy” is a modern sin.

Naish’s Underlying Message

Studying centuries of “bizarre advice” reveals less about what people did in bed than what they feared about themselves. Every manual, whether Taoist or television-era, is a mirror reflecting that culture’s contradictions—between desire and discipline, freedom and fear.

Naish closes by warning that even in the liberated 21st century, sex advice has become another form of control—dictating how we should feel, look, and perform. The difference is that the priests have been replaced by influencers. Understanding this history frees you to see that true sexual wisdom doesn’t come from experts or positions but from compassion, knowledge, and mutual respect—a truth as ancient as humanity itself.

Naish begins his cross‑cultural adventure in the tombs of Mawangdui, China, where silk scrolls dating to around 200 BC form the earliest known sex guides. These manuscripts weren’t pornographic; they were a serious mixture of medicine, Taoist spirituality, and metaphysics. They promised men health, strength, and even immortality if they mastered a specific discipline: having sex frequently with women—but never ejaculating.

Sex as Medicine and Magic

In the Taoist worldview, semen was a vessel of life force called chi. Every ejaculation, therefore, meant leaking power. The ideal lover was one who could absorb a woman’s yin energy without losing his own yang. If he succeeded, he gained longevity and mental clarity; if he failed, he aged and died sooner. These manuals included step‑by‑step rituals—the famous “hundred thrusts,” “ten refinements,” and elaborate seasonal timetables dictating when and how to copulate. Sex was less about love than about cosmic hygiene.

There were even Q&A dialogues between the legendary Yellow Emperor and his female advisors, the Plain Girl and the Mystery Girl, whose duty was to teach kings the rhythm of the universe through pleasure. Naish notes the irony that these guides recognized the female orgasm as crucial for health long before Western medicine did, yet also turned women into renewable batteries for male enlightenment.

Myth Meets Biology

Naish sets these early handbooks beside later pseudoscientific panics to illustrate how persistent certain ideas prove. The Taoist belief that emission drains life energy reappears in eighteenth‑century horror stories about masturbation. Medieval European physicians still talked of the “loss of vital humors.” Even self‑help writers today talk about “energy transference” and “sexual power.” The science was always fictional, but the longing—to control the uncontrollable—remains constant.

These Chinese texts also pioneered the commercial logic of the sex manual. They promised esoteric secrets available only to the initiated, exactly as modern books promise “the technique that will change your life.” In this way, Naish says, the Mawangdui manuscripts are ancestors of every modern bestseller that sells confidence disguised as knowledge.

Moving from ancient wisdom to medieval punishment, Naish shows how Christianity transformed sex from a natural force into a moral battlefield. In early medieval England, Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury’s Penitential was effectively a rulebook for human depravity. Where the Chinese prescribed thrust counts, Theodore listed penances: forty days for masturbation, ten years for homosexual acts, fifteen years if incest was involved. Pleasure wasn’t just wrong—it was measurable sin.

When the Body Became the Enemy

Church fathers like St Paul and St Augustine taught that celibacy was the highest virtue. Marital sex was tolerated only for procreation, and physical enjoyment—even between spouses—was suspect. Manuals such as De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) warned that menstruating women exhaled venom and could turn mirrors black. Here, misogyny masqueraded as theology. The female body became a site of contagion, justifying confinement and suspicion.

Medicine vs. Morality

Interestingly, Naish notes that medieval physicians sometimes subverted church dogma. Following the classical doctor Galen, they argued that orgasm was necessary to purge “seminal humors.” They even prescribed masturbation to cure hysteria, a fact Victorian historians later tried to erase. But the Church’s moral authority prevailed, attaching shame to any act of self‑pleasure. The result was a psychological hangover that would last for centuries.

Naish calls this era the moment when erotic knowledge turned into spiritual weaponry. Sex advice no longer helped people thrive; it told them exactly how to repent.

By charting this transformation, Naish helps you see how moral panic became a social technology. It regulated behavior, maintained hierarchy, and gave priests—and later, doctors—the power to define what counted as normal. Every time you see a modern list of “red flags” or “bad habits,” you’re looking at the descendant of a penitential table.

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century unleashed not just literacy but libido. Naish describes Renaissance Italy as the Internet of its day—a wild marketplace where illicit ideas could race between presses faster than censors could react. Venice, with more than a thousand publishers, became Europe’s capital of forbidden books. Among them flourished the first commercial sex manuals.

From Art to Anatomy

Giuliano Romano’s I Modi depicted sixteen explicit sexual positions, each paired in later editions with Pietro Aretino’s outrageous sonnets. The pope ordered the woodcuts destroyed, but pirated copies spread across Europe. Their phrasing—half artistic rapture, half bawdy instruction—set a new template: erotica justified as education. This formula would recur from French libertine manuals to Alex Comfort’s illustrated Joy of Sex four centuries later.

At the same time, doctors like Giovanni Marinello and pseudo‑Aristotelian compilers mixed medical advice with folklore, confidently explaining that right‑side testicles produced boys and left‑side girls. Printed sex guides—cheap, anonymous, portable—became the paperbacks of Renaissance Europe. Samuel Pepys admitted buying one only to burn it afterward, terrified of being found out. The duality of lust and shame was now woven into the printed page itself.

Early Reformers of Pleasure

Not all were smut merchants. Naish highlights Protestant Puritans who, contrary to stereotype, celebrated marital intimacy as divinely sanctified. Ministers such as William Whately urged couples to enjoy “mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake.” In contrast to Catholic chastity, Puritan advice was, paradoxically, more sex‑positive—provided it remained within wedlock. Here begins the Protestant work ethic of the bedroom: duty‑driven passion, supervised by conscience.

Renaissance publishing proved decisive: by turning erotic experience into material text, it opened the door to both censorship and mass curiosity. The same tension fuels modern media scandals. Aretino’s crimes echo today every time moral outrage boosts sales.

Few themes in Naish’s chronicle are as absurd—or revealing—as the centuries‑long war on masturbation. Beginning with the anonymous 1712 pamphlet Onania, Western society developed a collective neurosis around self‑touch. The author linked Onan’s biblical ‘sin of spilling seed’ to physical ruin, warning that self‑polluters would go blind, grow pimples, lose teeth, and die insane. The panic spread through medicine, theology, and commerce.

Quacks and Crusaders

Naish introduces an unforgettable cast: Dr Samuel Tissot, who claimed sperm loss caused consumption; Sylvanus Stall, who recorded sermons on wax cylinders warning boys about banisters; and John Harvey Kellogg, who prescribed cornflakes, bland diets, and circumcision to suppress desire. Even respectable sexologists like George Drysdale and Richard Carlile internalized the era’s fear of self‑indulgence. What began as moral prohibition had become medical orthodoxy.

Fear as Social Order

Naish argues that this obsession served a purpose: controlling the working class. Teaching guilt about bodily pleasure kept citizens disciplined. Convents of silence turned into psychiatric wards; now nervous ailments were blamed on nocturnal emissions. The same rhetoric that damned masturbation also condemned contraception, homosexuality, and female pleasure. For women, sexual appetite itself was pathologized as hysteria or nymphomania.

Reading these documents, you sense how fear of bodily autonomy disguised itself as compassion. Kellogg’s Plain Facts for Old and Young diagnosed leisure, spicy food, and corsets as triggers of lust, then offered cure by pain. His remedy for adolescent boys: circumcision without anaesthetic, so the punishment would ‘impress the mind.’ For girls: carbolic acid on the clitoris. It’s impossible not to shudder—and to recognize echoes of modern purity culture or moralistic “detox” trends that still conflate control with health.

In the early twentieth century, a new generation of reformers turned sex from sin into science. Naish devotes vivid portraits to Marie Stopes in Britain and Margaret Sanger in America—formidable, flawed pioneers who dragged sex education out of the pulpit and into the laboratory. Their mission wasn’t simply pleasure; it was survival, especially for women crushed by endless childbirth and ignorance.

Marie Stopes: The Virgin Messiah

Stopes, a botanist who wrote Married Love (1918) while still sexually inexperienced, blended romantic idealism with pseudo‑science. Her prose turned physiology into poetry: the ‘rhythmic tide’ of female desire, the fortnightly cycle of longing, the sea‑plant fluidity of lovers. For the first time, women readers were told their pleasure mattered. Yet Stopes also carried troubling beliefs—eugenics, racial hygiene, and an authoritarian zeal to breed a ‘superior race.’ Her contradictions mirrored her society’s confusion: liberation laced with control.

Margaret Sanger: The Rebel with a Clinic

Across the Atlantic, Sanger’s activism was more political. As a nurse in New York’s slums, she saw women dying from illegal abortions and childbirth fatigue. Her 1917 arrest for opening America’s first birth‑control clinic turned her into a media symbol. Sanger’s pamphlets, like What Every Girl Should Know, defied the Comstock obscenity laws and earned her jail time. Eventually she founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood. But she too mixed feminism with elitism, advocating sterilization for the ‘feebleminded.’

Naish credits both women for “inventing” modern sex advice—the idea that knowledge can liberate. But he also warns that their movements turned intimacy into bureaucracy, replacing priests with public health officials. The line between enlightenment and engineering remains perilously thin.

Naish’s final chapters trace the evolution from repression to abundance—the twentieth‑century explosion of sex research and publishing. Alfred Kinsey’s mid‑century surveys Sexual Behavior in the Human Male/Female (1948–53) shattered taboos by revealing that ordinary Americans were far less chaste than moralists believed. The Kinsey data paved the way for Masters and Johnson’s laboratory studies of human response in the 1960s, where electrodes replaced sermons.

Pop Sexology and the Marketplace

The 1960s and 70s transformed sex knowledge into lifestyle commodity. Doctor‑authors like David Reuben commercialized candor in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, a Q&A guide that mixed humor with misinformation (he famously recommended Coca‑Cola as a contraceptive douche). At the same time, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl and Cosmopolitan turned personal freedom into brand identity. Sexual empowerment had become aspirational consumerism: new positions, new cosmetics, new you.

Alex Comfort’s Joyful Revolution

Against that backdrop came Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972). A British gerontologist and peace activist, Comfort framed intimacy as gourmet cooking: creative, experimental, shared. Illustrated with bearded nudes, his book normalized sensual variety while promoting kindness and consent—a gentle humanism amid the noise of liberation. Its success (12 million copies) marked the moment sex left the shadows of guilt. And yet, as Naish notes, even this liberation carried its own pressures: to perform, to experiment, to live up to glossy ideals.

By closing with Comfort, Naish completes the arc from secrecy to saturation. Whether carved in silk or printed in color gloss, every age’s manuals promise the same thing—certainty about an act forever resistant to rules.

Naish ends with a mischievous twist: after two millennia of religious bans and medical fears, today’s culture drowns in positivity. We celebrate sex endlessly, yet remain obsessed with doing it ‘right.’ From influencers to therapists, a new class of experts profits by diagnosing inadequacy instead of sin. The bookstore shelves heaped with glossy guides are heirs to every superstition he’s chronicled—only the tone has flipped from shame to self‑optimization.

From Repression to Performance

The modern mantra of constant arousal, Naish suggests, has created a subtler tyranny. In the past, celibacy was deviant; today, not being orgasmic enough is. Psychology has replaced theology, but both demand confession. We still consume manuals to compare, correct, and conform. The metrics have changed—from sins counted to positions mastered—but the anxiety is familiar.

Learning the Real Lesson

Naish’s history encourages you to laugh but also to reflect. Behind every weird tip—never after meals, rub with camel fat, avoid goblins—lies the same human impulse: to make sense of intimacy. His takeaway is simple yet radical: genuine sexual health isn’t a formula handed down; it’s empathy learned through experience. Understanding this lineage frees you from both superstition and perfectionism. Sex advice, ancient or modern, is ultimately about learning how not to let fear—of God, germs, or inadequacy—dictate desire.

As Naish wryly concludes, perhaps the next wave of manuals will battle the new “genital tyranny”—the pressure to perform, look perfect, and optimize pleasure. Until then, his rollicking chronicle of two millennia of bad advice serves as both an education and a reminder: humans have always been ridiculous about sex, but also endearingly hopeful that knowledge can turn confusion into connection.